I started in 2004 with a PII Deschutes running at 400 MHz. Then in 2008 I bought a SUN WS with an Opteron 1210 at 1.8 GHz, still running 24/7. I bought a 1220 CPU from a relative and an ASUS Silent Square EVO cooler. The CPU should reach 2.8 GHz. I am going to try this transplant as soon as I have learned to use the touchpad of a HP 635 laptop with an AMD E-450 at 1.65 GHz, using only 15 W.All on Linux. The HP Linux is SuSE SLES-11.
Tullio

I have no idea what it was my first cruncher... But I think it was a Pentium MMX or an i486... In that host, crunching 24/7, one WU (I guess an ancestor of the MB...) needed a whole week to finish... Soon all my work computers were crunching for SETI...

My best cruncher today is an i7-2600 with a GTX680... That host by itself gives me in one day the same amount of credits that I got in the first 8 years with an average of 4 or 5 hosts running SETI 24/7.

I have no idea what it was my first cruncher... But I think it was a Pentium MMX or an i486... In that host, crunching 24/7, one WU (I guess an ancestor of the MB...) needed a whole week to finish... Soon all my work computers were crunching for SETI...

My best cruncher today is an i7-2600 with a GTX680... That host by itself gives me in one day the same amount of credits that I got in the first 8 years with an average of 4 or 5 hosts running SETI 24/7.

If I'm not mistaken the Xeon processor is more than 25,000 times more powerful* than C64's 6510. And my Xeon rig has 250,000 times the RAM.

We've come a long way.

*- Not a proper comparison, just quick math by comparing processing speed and bit register and core count. I'm sure the architecture changes etc. mean the Xeon is probably much more than 25,000 times more powerful than the 6510.

[Interesting side note: You think we've got fan-fare arguments about what hardware is better nowadays?... Once upon a time the ZX people used to argue with C64 folks, about differences so little our modern machines would laugh...

...was it a real figure? Does it mean that Zx Spectrum "runs at 2:1" (two times faster than Commodore 64)? I guess this is exact. But... why did you criticize people "extolling the virtues of the Spectrum"? Why did you forget the "virtues" that you were going to demonstrate? Another Commodorian Blah-Blah-Blah, eh?

I have no idea what it was my first cruncher... But I think it was a Pentium MMX or an i486... In that host, crunching 24/7, one WU (I guess an ancestor of the MB...) needed a whole week to finish... Soon all my work computers were crunching for SETI...

My best cruncher today is an i7-2600 with a GTX680... That host by itself gives me in one day the same amount of credits that I got in the first 8 years with an average of 4 or 5 hosts running SETI 24/7.

Impressive, 4 or 5 hmm, 1 here.

SETI was a very nice screensaver in that times... So it was running on all the computers in my work office. (with permission, as I was one of the partners) ;D

I thought the project was so fun and I loved the screen saver so much that I installed it on several of my other computers I owned (Including a Pentium 166MHz w/MMX and an AMD K6 166MHz among many others). Currently I use:

All very interesting! I remember back years ago seeing SETI running on the computers in the computer lab at my grade school. That was when my interest in this project was born. Although it was a little bit of a wait before I started crunching.... Still its very interesting to compare the past computers to what we are running now. Simply stated now-a-days we are spoiled!-"Young" James

"To my mathematical brain, the numbers alone make thinking about aliens perfectly rational. The real challenge is to work out what aliens might actually be like." -Steven Hawking